Ronald Albert Simpson (1 February 1929 – 2 October 2002) was an Australian poet and poetry editor, artist and art lecturer.
Simpson was one of a group of Melbourne poets, including Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Vincent Buckley, Noel Macainsh, and Alexander Craig, who came together in the 1960s and 1970s.
Verse had long been under the thumb of the landed gentry and Sydney quasi-bohemians, but he stuck resolutely, quietly, diurnally to the way most of us live".
[2] Gorton qualifies this, though, by writing that Simpson's poetry's strength is that it is "at once so commonplace and odd", providing an artist's "skewed perspective on familiar happenings".
[3] Gorton suggests too, that his poetry is extroverted rather than inward-looking, that it can be "comic and lugubrious, ponderous and terse", and that he can turn his analysis on himself.